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A 7-year-old boy fell to his death from the 8th floor of a Kagoshima prefectural housing complex on Sunday.
Just past 3 p.m., police received an emergency phone call from the boy’s mother stating that her son had fallen from a passageway on the apartment complex’s 8th floor located in Shimoishiki 1-chome, Sankei Shimbun reported.
When police arrived at the scene, Yusei Hidaka was found collapsed on the ground and unconscious. He was taken to hospital, but died about two hours later.
According to police, Yusei was visiting a friend who also lives on the 8th floor. While waiting for his friend, Yusei is believed to have climbed over a one-meter-high wall that leads to a corridor connecting the neighboring apartments.
Police believe that as Yusei tried to climb over the wall, he accidentally fell 21 meters to the ground.
© Japan Today
5 Comments
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TumbleDry
1m is too low...
mmwkdw
Geez - my heart goes out to the Parents.
Disillusioned
Yeah, but, think about it people. Would you let your kid play on the edge of a 24 meter cliff? Playing on a stairwell in an apartment block is the same thing. The 7th floor apartment I used to live in had a gate at the entrance that, when opened, became a ladder to a 30 meter drop over a 1m high wall. I was terrified one of my kids were gonna go over it. Sadly, most of these multi-story apartment buildings are not made with child safety in mind and not only in Japan. Even the smaller 3-4 story apartment blocks are not safe for kids with small guard rails and flimsy fly screens. However, I can't blame the engineers or architects. Call me a victim blamer if you like, but parents should be aware of the dangers and not leave their kids unsupervised on apartment block stairwells. These same parents wouldn't let their kids play on a cliff, but the apartment stairwell is ok. That's just stupid!
rainyday
These stories of kids falling from highrise apartments are way too common, they need to do a much better job of designing residential apartment buildings without easy to access death traps like that.
When my son was born we lived on the sixth floor of a building that was just a nightmare from that perspective. The air conditioner units on the balcony provided an easy stepping stone that a kid as young as 3 could climb up and then be over the balcony wall to an unobstructed drop to the street below. There was no way of moving them and the kid locks on the balcony doors could be very easily circumvented by most kids.
The bedroom windows posed the same problem - put a bed anywhere in it and voila - easy access to a window that only had a rudimentary lock and nothing to stop a kid from falling 6 floors from it.
We could foresee that no amount of childproofing would be sufficient once he reached a certain age simply becuase of the weak design of the place, so we moved out (well for that and other reasons). But the building is still full of families with kids and its only a matter of time before tragedy strikes. And that is just one building out of god knows how many out there.
sensei258
Go to Daiso and buy window/door locks for 108 yen each. They clamp on the top track, and when hand-tightened by an adult, would be too difficult for a small child to loosen. That's what I did when our grandchildren moved in to our 7th floor apartment built in the 70's.